Who's Afraid of Veridical Wool?

I have been taking an informal approach to the Liar paradox, for the following reasons. After much thought, I find self-descriptions like ‘this is false’ to be about as true as not. I am therefore beginning, with the following – previously posted – post, with the equally ancient paradoxes of vagueness. And my approach is informal because I find the precision of mathematical logic to be inapposite when there is no sharp division between something being the case and it not being the case. Although the literature on these paradoxes has become increasingly formal, following Bertrand Russell’s interest in Georg Cantor’s mathematics (at the start of the twentieth century), we do not need non-classical logic to resolve them, I think; rather, we need to focus on the context of classical logic, natural language, in which the paradoxes are expressed. Below, and temporally prior to, ‘Vagueness’, I have posted ‘Liar Paradox’ and ‘Cantor and Russell’.

It was via Russell that I came to consider the Liar paradox, having developed an interest in Cantor because of qualms about the fitness of the real number line as a model of actual continua, which developed as I did my MSc in Mathematics (at the end of the twentieth century). With this post I have come to the end of my journey; I am left wondering why our mathematics became set-theoretical, and then category-theoretical, and similarly, why our natural philosophy became the physicalism of Einstein et al, and then string-theoretical. How well, I wonder, will our democracies be able to regulate the biotechnical industries of this century? I have serious doubts, stemming from my research into physics, theoretical and empirical, and from the history of our regulation of financial industries (which are surely less complex). Still, in the absence of any interest in my research, I have been developing more aesthetic interests over on Google+...